Four times bigger than ever before

John Carter steps on a plane in twelve hours for the final leg of a flight to Port Moresby in the South Pacific.

There he will run one of the largest evangelistic campaigns in Christian history.

Organizers are expecting 100,000 a night for the 15 days of meetings. But they’ve set up the giant stadium so that it can handle 200,000 if necessary.

In most years for the last 30 years John Carter has run an evangelistic campaign with 1000 baptisms. But this campaign much larger than the largest he has ever done.

“This campaign is going to be four times bigger than ever before,” says Susan Piranio, who’s been a key player in twenty Carter Report campaigns. “So we have four times more issues coming up. But we also have a much greater opportunity to see what God does.

“There’s a lot of things that are out of our control. So there’s a lot of anticipation, relying on a lot of people that things happen as they are supposed to,” she says.

Despite incredibly good pre-planning, things have gone very wrong. But God’s hands have been over the event.

Hundreds of locals were organized to help erect ten tons of equipment on Sunday and Monday (with Monday a national holiday in Papua New Guinea).

However, there was political unrest due to the national election, and ballot papers were stored at the same venue we are using. So whenever people wanted to protest the election results, they did it at our venue. Police said it was too dangerous for our volunteers to be there setting up the event there.

For our own safety, police wouldn’t allow us to start erecting 10 tons of equipment on the site until Monday afternoon. That meant we lost about 70% of the time volunteers had pledged to give us.

The next serious disaster was security. There’s a group called “rascals” here, but the term has a much worse meaning here than in the United States. They would happily steal thousands of dollars of our equipment. So we needed top security to protect our gear.

However, the promised security personnel have not arrived. “I’ve been begging them for security for two days now, but it hasn’t happened,” says John Carter. “We desperately need people to pray that the promised security people will turn up to guard our equipment.

“Harold Harker (a retired pastor from Australia) is guarding the equipment by himself,” says John Carter. “There was a fire on the site today and the workers were driven off the site by the smoke. But Harold stayed there by himself, guarding the equipment through the smoke.

“Tonight he is sleeping with the equipment, praying for security to prevent items being stolen. There is half a million dollars worth of equipment at risk.

“The situation is that we need prayer now for the locals to supply the security we need. We desperately need people to pray that the promise security people will turn up to guard our equipment.” says Pastor Carter.